The Contribution of Weligepola Pradeshiya Sabha to the Development of Regional Common Facilities.

Abstract

Local government is defined as the administration of a particular county or district, with representatives elected by those who live there. The purpose of a local government is to manage the welfare needs of the inhabitants of a particular locality under the jurisdiction of the respective local government body. The legislation of the local government system of Sri Lanka is composed mainly of the Municipal Council Ordinance, the Urban Council Ordinance and the Pradeshiya Sabha Act which have been passed by the national state assembly at the parliament in consideration of the welfare of the entire population of the state. Yet when it comes to practical governance, the conditions laid down in the particular ordinances and acts do not have their impact on the activities concerned. As a result, the development projects and services implemented by the local government bodies are not evenly distributed within the geographical areas concerned. According to the survey made under this study, the function of the local government body of the Weligepola Pradeshiya Sabha is a classic example of this discrepancy. It was understood during the survey that the main reason for this situation is the politicisation of the local government administration that hinders equal treatment of all the Gramasewa Divisions under it. Therefore, this paper proposes that the governance of the local government bodies need to be streamlined in accordance with the relevant legislations in the state. The methodology for this research was based on both primary and secondary data. SPSS 17 was used to analyse the data. The sample was collected from the three villages in the Opanayake Divisional secretariat namely Lendara, Opanayake and Kahakoratuwa, in accordance with the Snowball sampling method. Accordingly, 20 families were randomly selected from